Is Apple Right That The iWatch Is Going To Kill The Swiss Watch Industry?

As the clock ticks down on Apple's rumored iWatch announcement tomorrow at their big event, now's the perfect time to revisit the smartwatch vs. mechanical watch debate — especially considering Apple's lead designer, Jony Ive, is said to have recently bragged that the Swiss watch industry would be in big trouble once the iWatch dropped. Which side do you fall on?

There has been a certain amount of angst in the watch world about how the smart watch could create a crisis in watchmaking. Will established brands be driven off consumers’ wrists by a wave of ultra-cool, ultra-connected wearable computers that keep you in touch with everything from emails to social media to Yelp reviews?

The idea seems frighteningly compelling, at first glance — after all, there’s some precedent for the idea, namely the near-fatal effect of quartz technology on traditional watchmaking. Quartz watches came on the scene in 1969, originally as a very expensive luxury item — the first, the Seiko Astron, was sold only in gold and cost as much as a new car — and they rapidly drove mechanical watches off of wrists and into dresser drawers.

But today, most serious watch guys would give their eyeteeth to find an old Rolex or Patek gathering dust in a dresser drawer. They’ve become blue-chip collectibles, selling for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and mechanical watchmaking’s enjoying an explosive revival. So will smart watches make us all look dumb for loving machines that tick?

The hype surrounding smart watches and so-called wearable technology is pretty considerable, but if you look at the actual products, what we’ve got so far are not so much a series of fundamental game changers or existential threats to mechanical watchmaking as a series of interesting failures (and uninteresting failures, for that matter). Let’s take the most talked-about wearable so far, Google Glass. Leaving aside the fact that if you do wear Glass you’re immediately stigmatized as a privacy-violating, style-insensitive clod, there’s the fact that it doesn’t actually do anything much better than a smartphone, while at the same time making you look insecure, as if you don’t dare cut the umbilical cord to the Internet for even a second. They don’t make you look like a cutting-edge early adopter so much as a particularly harried certified public accountant in one of the original Star Wars movies — bookkeeper to the Empire!

The smart watches we have so far have the same basic problems — so much so that the real question shouldn’t be “Will smart watches bury wristwatches” but rather, “Will smart watches have any chance of succeeding at all?"